Family Friendly Award

Cornwall Museums Partnership and South West Museum Development created the very first Cornwall Heritage Awards to celebrate and champion the amazing work that’s taking place in our museums and heritage organisations.

Each week we are highlighting their fantastic work across Cornwall. This week we are focussing on the award for the activities and services provided that create all-round excellent family visits.

The museum worked with Kneehigh Theatre and Cornwall One Parent Support to create a series of short audio stories. These were gathered from local memories prompted by museum artefacts and locations around the town, the app weaves them into a town trail. The museum hosted memory gathering events with groups of older and younger people, and the final app was launched with a tea time treat event. The museum also offers a number of family trails with a monthly prize draw, and every child receives a souvenir postcard as a memory of their visit. To follow the trail please visit the website.

Highly Commended – Lostwithiel Museum – Children’s Trail

Lostwithiel Museum’s children’s trail is a free activity for families with young children. It was designed to encourage them to explore the contents of the museum and to help them learn about Lostwithiel’s history in a fun way. Miniature Sylvanian animals are dressed in costumes that epitomize the characters that illustrate the life featured in the displays. Each character has a clue to lead the child to the next story. There are clues to solve along the way and each child receives a reward sticker.

Highly Commended – Penryn Museum – Marmaduke the Museum Mouse

Marmaduke is a cartoon character that was created to help make the museum more user-friendly for younger visitors. The museum team felt that some artefacts needed a little more interpretation to help them come to life for children. The Marmaduke characters are places around the museum and moved on a regular basis to create changing trails, quiz sheets and activities that encourage young visitors to explore, discover and have fun with history.